Bound to be Held: A Book Show
March 26–June 28, 2015
Complete Wall Text
Josh Greene is a Bay Area artist who loves books.
Bound to be Held celebrates the physical relationship between a reader and a book; for Greene
and many others the touch and scent of a printed page in the hand offers a visceral pleasure.
For some it is the reassuring sentiment around the lifelong habit of reading; for others it is
the ability to leave the everyday world behind to sink into a good story. For many Jews—the
People of the Book (Am HaSefer in Hebrew)—there is an attachment to the way a text like
the Jewish Bible can provide the framework for a community’s identity. Furthermore, Jewish
culture has always emphasized learning and a passion for the inherent value of the written
word. Perhaps, Greene's project suggests, Judaism is in part about being not so much the
People of the Book, but of the books.
The exhibition is in three parts. In the first, Greene shares a selection from his ongoing
project Read by Famous. Over the past year or two, he has asked a wide range of well-known
and successful people to pluck meaningful books from their shelves and donate them to the
project. Eventually the books—he has received almost one hundred—will be auctioned to
benefit literacy campaigns. For this exhibition a selection of books are on the gallery wall,
alongside photographs of inscriptions, notes, annotations and other markings that the book
donors have made. The second section of the show is titled The Library of Particular
Significance, and contains hundreds of books donated by the general public, again with their
statements about their relationship to those books. There is also a card catalog with further
information. Because it is a functioning lending library, the museum experience is expanded
to include taking display materials home, albeit temporarily. Finally, Greene provides a
comfortable reading area for individuals or small groups to enjoy some time in the gallery,
not as spectators but active users.
In addition to exploring our relationship with books as objects, a number of other
issues are brought up by this exhibition.
•Repurposing the museum gallery as a site for potential social interaction—e.g. a
library—is a central and ongoing interest of the artist throughout his career. This is
consistent with the museum strategy of not being solely about display, of also being a place
that generates art and change.
•Greene invites us to examine our assumptions and attitudes about celebrity by
juxtaposing the reading choices of both renowned and private individuals.
•How do we normally encounter books in our lives? We see them by chance at
friend’s homes, read about them in media reviews, catch strangers reading in public. We also
can deliberately visit large-scale book storage in bookstores, the public library, a private
collection, a book show in a museum, or in the cloud. Bound to be Held asks us to examine the
meaning and implications of all these experiences, and their relative importance and
qualitative value.
•We are further invited to examine our values about reading in public versus in our
homes: how are those experiences different?
•How do the various means of distributing (or not distributing) books—by selling,
Bound to be Held: A Book Show
March 26–June 28, 2015
Complete Wall Text
loaning, viewing, owning, hoarding, recommending, viewing—have an effect on our
experience of them?
•How do we feel about the sensory differences between the reading experience of
the printed page versus other, digital formats?
Bound to be Held is an exhibition that puts forward the idea that public gathering in the name
of culture is a precious experience that binds us to one another. Whether at a movie theater,
a museum, or a library, community is built through sitting down in the same space and
sharing an aesthetic or intellectual experience, especially in a culture that increasingly divides
and isolates us from one another.